If you want to get a spectator’s perspective on the deaths of nearly 300 men, women and children, it would be hard to go past the official investigation report into the crash of a Korean jumbo jet on the Pacific island of Guam three years ago. It makes chilling reading:

"A hunter and his friend were hunting on Nimitz Hill during the night of August 6, 1997. The hunter said he heard the airplane first before he saw it. It was extremely loud and was so close it caused the ground to vibrate.

"He said the noise was so loud he could not hear himself screaming at his friend. He said the airplane passed over him approximately 8-10 feet above him in a descending right-wing-low attitude. It appeared as if the right wing was almost touching the ground.

"The shock of the airplane passing over caused the hunter to fall over backwards, and the noise from the plane caused him to be deaf for over an hour. He said the airplane looked huge as it approached and he thought it was going to hit him.

"He could see the wingtip lights flashing and could see the lights of the cabin windows as it passed."

The image of a fully-laden Boeing 747 jet coming straight at you in the middle of an otherwise calm night, and missing you by less than three metres, is hard to shake. On board were nearly 300 people apparently blissfully unaware of their impending doom less than half a second away. Like all air passengers, they had implicit faith in their pilots.

The report continues:

"It appeared as though the plane did not hit the ground until very near where it came to rest. The hunter said he was standing approximately 200 feet from where the airplane came to rest. He said the noise, ground vibration and shock of the closeness of the plane caused him and his friend to ‘almost return to caveman days’.

"He said they couldn’t talk or hear and were unable to communicate. He said he thought he was going to die when he saw the plane approaching. When the airplane hit the ground it seemed to nose in. There was a big ball of flame and a shock wave that knocked him over again. The flame burned very big and very bright then continued to burn. The ground shook from the impact when it hit.

"The hunter said he and his friend were almost unable to walk. They would run and stumble and crawl on hands and knees. He continued to run and fall, running toward the Nimitz Hill road…"

It wasn’t the first major disaster to hit Korean Airlines, and it probably won’t be the last. But for five months after the crash, Air New Zealand continued to code-share seats on Korean Airlines flights out of Auckland, meaning that people buying Air New Zealand tickets to Korea sometimes found themselves travelling on a Korean Airlines plane. Yet Korean Airlines would subsequently be determined as one of the most unsafe airlines in the region. Air New Zealand did later cancel the code-sharing, but that was because it pulled its own flights out of Korea because the Asian economic crisis caused a drop in travel.

Should Air New Zealand have continued booking its passengers onto KAL flights while that airline’s safety was under investigation? Hindsight makes for 20/20 vision, but it is worth noting that another KAL jumbo crashed a year later, prompting such widespread concern in the aviation community that Delta Airlines, Air Canada and the US Defense Department all bailed out of relationships with KAL.

Air safety is a subject that creates emotional responses in both passengers and airlines. Airlines all believe they are safe operators, and resent questioning of their standards. And passengers rely on assurances from Civil Aviation authorities around the world to give them comfort that when they buy an air ticket they’re not playing Russian Roulette.

But, as you’ll discover later in this article, assurances from Civil Aviation agencies are not necessarily worth the paper they’re written on. And therein lies the problem.

Since then, the airline has recovered to become one of the 20 largest airlines in the world with a reputation as one of the safest, but there are those with first-hand experience of Air New Zealand’s operations culture who believe the airline has begun taking unnecessary risks and has an alleged "profits before people" attitude.

Take the case of Flight NZ2 from Auckland to London on 23 March 1994. An internal Air New Zealand report, leaked to Investigate, tells a frightening story that its passengers were probably unaware of at the time.

One of the airline’s new 747-400s, ZK-NBT, had just taken off from its stopover in Los Angeles, to continue the final leg of its journey to London. Suddenly, only 5000 feet off the ground en route to a cruising altitude of 37,000 feet, the pilots found it difficult to "roll out of a turn", and had to apply extra aileron trim to keep the plane level. Additionally, "The autopilot could not be engaged," notes the internal report.

Searching frantically for answers, a check of onboard computers showed "the right inboard aileron was deflected fully down and the right flight spoilers deployed."

The ailerons, or flaps, are key elements in steering the plane and landing it. An aileron fault is similar to having a loose wheel on a car. In disbelief, the flight crew sent one of their number back to cattle class to see for themselves whether they had a problem with the right wing. Sure enough, says the leaked report, the problem "was confirmed by visual observation".

With up to 380 souls on board – men, women and children – the flight crew had a choice to make. They could either turn back to Los Angeles or divert to the nearest major airport, or they could continue on to London in a fully-laden jumbo jet having steering difficulties. Their destination was eight hours away.

"The aircraft had experienced an ongoing spoiler problem which had not been rectified in LAX," comments the official report somewhat less than reassuringly. "Accordingly the crew initially believed they had a spoiler problem. After some experimentation, it was determined that by using 1.8 units of aileron trim and 1.5 units of right rudder trim, the autopilot could be engaged with the spoilers retracted.

"The crew’s initial reaction was to return to LAX, which would have entailed dumping some 80 tonnes of fuel," says the report, without mentioning that the fuel was worth tens of thousands of dollars.

"The problem was discussed with LAX Engineering on VHF. An attempt to contact Maintenance Watch [in New Zealand] on HF was unsuccessful. About an hour later, contact was established with Maintenance Watch who initially agreed with the decision to turn back.

"Additional technical information was obtained which suggested that a control linkage failure on the input side of the inboard aileron power control package would bias the control surface to the fully down position.

"Forecast conditions for the flight’s arrival in Gatwick were not ideal, with a strong gusty wind."

So, to recap to this point: an Air New Zealand 747-400 with hundreds of passengers on board develops a serious flight control system failure after taking off from Los Angeles, leaving the pilots with a choice of whether to carry on to a destination where rough weather is forecast that could make a landing disastrous, or to turn back to Los Angeles and disrupt the travellers.

"After considering all factors, the Captain elected to continue on to LGW; a decision that was acceptable to Maintenance Watch."

But not acceptable to at least one Air New Zealand executive – the man who leaked the internal report to Investigate. Our source is scathing:

"The flight crew, and the maintenance personnel, in my view made a decision that put the lives of up to 380 Air New Zealand passengers at serious risk. They took a gamble they were not entitled to take. Not only would the passengers most certainly have been killed had the aircraft crashed, but so too were they risking the lives of all the Americans whose homes and businesses were underneath NZ2’s flight path.

"That plane went past airport after airport where it could have landed safely. I believe Air New Zealand broke American aviation law by not reporting the incident to US flight controllers."

A search of US aviation regulations confirmed there is a requirement to notify.

"Federal regulations require operators to notify the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) immediately of aviation accidents and certain incidents. An incident is an occurrence other than an accident that affects or could affect the safety of operations."

And under the heading "Aircraft Accident and Incident Reporting", the NTSB regulations further state:

"Occurrences Requiring Notification – the operator of an aircraft shall immediately, and by the most expeditious means available, notify the nearest National Transportation Safety Board Field Office when…any of the following listed incidents occur: (a) Flight control system malfunction or failure…"

So the question is – did Air New Zealand notify US authorities as required by law? And for that matter did the airline notify the Governments of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland or Britain that it was flying through their airspace with a malfunctioning flight control system on a jumbo jet?

Air New Zealand claims it was not required to notify anyone other than New Zealand’s CAA, which it did in due course.

"Air New Zealand was not required by Federal law 49 CFR 830 to notify the US National Transportation Safety Board of the incident of 23.3.94," said the airline’s group communications manager David Beatson in a prepared statement to Investigate.

"The incident occurred after the aircraft had departed its last port of call in the United States and while it was en route to London, and did not fall within the criteria for reporting contained in 49 CFR 830.

"The incident was properly reported to the New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority. Internal inquiry by the company’s flight operations management and examination by NZ-CAA found no fault with the procedures followed by the crew."

The New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority is required under international rules to notify the FAA of relevant incidents. Surprisingly, although the CAA has admitted it knew of the jumbo jet malfunction, it does not have a copy of Air New Zealand’s internal investigation on file. Nor did it advise US authorities.

This is the same CAA that closed down the commuter airline Cityjet for a range of smaller issues that never put 400 people’s lives at risk. We’ll come back to Civil Aviation’s "investigation" of the incident in a moment.

Fortunately, when NZ2 arrived in London, the weather conditions were not as bad as forecast and the plane landed safely, its passengers none the wiser – unaware that their own lives had been on the line.

Once again, our Air New Zealand source:

"Let’s look at the possible scenarios. The plane was sufficiently seriously affected that they had to use the rudder and excess aileron trim on the left wing to keep the aircraft stable. They didn’t know what had caused the right aileron to lock into the down position, and the possibility was always open that at any moment the malfunction could correct itself.

"Now that would be OK at 37,000 feet. The plane would lurch and bounce, but the pilots should have ample time to release the compensating rudder trim and rebalance the aircraft. But what would have happened if the malfunction corrected itself as the plane was about to touch down at London? At fifty or a hundred feet off the ground, that Boeing 747 could have plummeted into Gatwick’s runway long before the Captain compensated for it. Everyone on board would have died.

"And let’s allow for the fact also that the plane could have hit serious turbulence or weather conditions requiring every ounce of control and maneuverability. Control that wasn’t totally there."

A dramatic example of just such an occurrence can be found in NTSB archives, which reveal how a China Airlines jumbo jet hit clear air turbulence at 37,000 feet that caused an engine speed variation, and as the pilots tried to maintain level flight they lost control.

The 747 with 273 people on board rolled to the right and entered an uncontrolled dive towards the ground. The pilots didn’t regain control until the plane was just 11,000 feet above the ground, and the aircraft didn’t level off until 9,500 feet.

The NTSB report notes:

"During descent/recovery, aircraft was damaged by acceleration forces and high speed. There was evidence the pilot was preoccupied with engine problem."

If the same kind of problem had struck NZ2, what would have been the outcome?

The airline executive’s concerns appear to be mirrored in the internal report, which notes at the end:

"There will no doubt be a divergence of opinion amongst flight crews as to whether this flight should have continued to destination or turned back.

"This was a very unusual failure, for which procedures have not been developed or training given.

"On this occasion the outcome was successful. That is not to say that in slightly different circumstances, the outcome would be the same."

Once engineers had stripped the affected area, they discovered the shank of a broken quarter inch fastener bolt had fouled the aileron mechanism. "Its origin was not determined although it had obviously been lodged in this position for a considerable time."

Ironically, the pilots responsible for the decision to keep flying the crippled airliner were subsequently promoted.

New Zealand Civil Aviation boss Kevin Ward claims the flight control systems malfunction was not serious, because Air New Zealand has assured the CAA it wasn’t. And because it wasn’t serious, he claims the Americans, Canadians, Icelanders, Irish and British did not have to be informed they had a dodgy jumbo jet passing overhead.

"This occurrence did not meet the agreed international criteria for reporting an incident or accident. It was not assessed by the crew as being a serious incident or a major problem. They were however required to report the event to the CAA which they did through the airline’s reporting system.

"Aircrew are required to be able to assess problems which occur in flight as part of their normal duties. They train for this and have written guidance material on board the aircraft," says Ward reassuringly, although you can see from the leaked report above that he is totally wrong – the flight crew had never trained for this and came to a solution by trial and error.

But CAA boss Kevin Ward continues:

"They also have the ability to contact the airline by radio if this is felt necessary. In this case the aircraft was assessed as controllable in accordance with the onboard reference material."

Once again, Ward – the Civil Aviation boss whose task is to ensure public safety – appears to be wrong. By Air New Zealand’s own admission in its internal investigation, no procedures had ever been developed nor had training ever been given to its pilots to handle what the airline was privately calling "a very unusual failure". So how much confidence can the New Zealand travelling public or the Government have in assurances from the CAA given the evidence you’ve just read?

It gets worse, however, and we’ll return to the CAA investigation shortly.

The extreme risk of Air New Zealand’s decision to troubleshoot in midair and keep flying has been thrown into graphic relief as US federal investigators probe last year’s crash of an Alaska Airlines MD-83 jet off the Californian coast. The plane was en route from Mexico to San Francisco. The Feds now know that Alaska Airlines was doing exactly what Air New Zealand did, with a very similar problem. Only this time, they lost the gamble and 88 lives perished in icy Pacific waters.

In a front page news article headlined "Why didn’t crew land the plane?", the Seattle Post-Intelligencer tells a story that will seem eerily familiar.

"Second guesses started even as investigators began pulling debris and bodies from the Pacific’s cool waters to piece together the final moments of Alaska Airlines Flight 261.

"The flight crew was aware of mechanical problems in the aircraft’s stabiliser. They knew, too, that their airplane was within landing range of several airports. Yet they chose to continue flying toward their next scheduled stop, San Francisco, even as they discussed the stabiliser problem for at least a half hour with Alaska personnel on the ground.

"After the crash, aviation experts, bolstered by hindsight, quietly and reluctantly started questioning the crew’s decision to trouble shoot rather than touch down."

Lawyers acting for families killed in the crash immediately began their own investigations, with one of them – aviation litigator Robert Clifford – pointing out that Flight 261 had passed at least nine commercial or military airports where its pilot could have landed and possibly averted disaster.

"I mean, hell, why didn’t they land in San Diego?" Clifford told the newspaper. "They were in an emergency situation and instead of landing they were troubleshooting in the air."

Which is exactly what the Air New Zealand flight crew had done for more than an hour.

Another aviation lawyer representing families of the dead in the Flight 261 crash, Paul Hedlund, told the San Francisco Chronicle that manufacturers and airlines do not have a "zero tolerance" policy towards air safety.

"As in every airline crash, especially in this one, the implications of sloppy maintenance and poor piloting are pervasive."

But the analysis of the Alaska Airlines disaster continued in aviation circles.

"Information now disclosed by the investigation reveals that the autopilot was shut of and the aircraft hand flown during much of the two hour flight," a private pilot posted in an aviation discussion group on the internet. "That likely means that the stabiliser trim was not working properly, since MD-83s are otherwise flown on autopilot most of the time.

"Airline pilots are retrained every six months. That’s why they are so good. We look at them in awe and respect them (and pay them pretty well too) because they are, as we see it, all there is between us passengers and our worst nightmare come true – a crash.

"Unfortunately, recurrent training in an MD-83 simulator does not include troubleshooting a stabiliser system failure, except to recognise a runaway trim and deal with it before it gets to aircraft uncontrollability.

"No training is conducted to demonstrate loss of aircraft control or how to regain it if the stabiliser limits are exceeded.

"Thus, troubleshooting in the air a malfunctioning stabiliser trim system is like taking passengers on an experimental test flight! Aircraft maintenance is designed to be performed on the ground, not in the air.

"Malfunctioning flight controls are an emergency that requires an immediate landing at the closest airport, period!"

Our Air New Zealand source claims he raised concerns with his colleagues after the incident but was met with the response that turning back to Los Angeles would have caused massive disruption to the passengers.

"Think of the disruption if they’d half rolled into the North Atlantic," retorted the operations executive who raised the concern.

New Zealand Civil Aviation officials say, however, that they are "satisfied" with Air New Zealand’s actions. Which is undoubtedly comforting news for the travelling public.

There are those in the aviation industry in New Zealand who reckon the bureaucrats at the CAA would have been the kind of people to make reassuring noises even as the Titanic slipped beneath the waves, from sheer force of habit, and not because they actually know what they’re talking about. In an industry that relies heavily on public confidence, it is not the done thing to panic the peasants.

And the CAA can make a silk purse from a sow’s ear that would calm all but the most hardened journalists.

"Whilst it may seem that there are similarities between this event and the Alaskan Airlines flight 261 of last year, the events are quite different," continued Kevin Ward reassuringly in his statement to Investigate.

"The Air New Zealand aircraft was controllable at all times. The Boeing 747 has sufficient redundancy designed into the system to deal with an inboard aileron failure."

Well, let’s take a closer look at that claim.

The Air New Zealand aircraft was not "controllable at all times". By Air New Zealand’s own admission in its internal report, the autopilot system initially shutdown because of the aileron fault, meaning not only did the pilots have to figure out what was wrong, they had to manually take control of the plane at the same time. It took some considerable time before the fault could be compensated for enough to allow the autopilot to re-engage. Control was only established "after some experimentation".

And what about the Boeing 747’s design enhancements? While Ward makes it sound as though the crew had it sussed from the first moment and simply flicked through their 747 inflight repair manual, the truth is very different.

Air New Zealand’s leaked internal report reveals that the airline had no clues about what had caused the fault at the time, whether it would somehow self-correct inflight, or even what the impact would be on the 747s safety.

Nor did the flight crew know if the unresolved spoiler problem they’d been experiencing would kick in again and make the flight even more unsafe.

The report states that after engineers on the ground finally located the cause of the malfunction, only then did they approach Boeing "for future guidance…on the likely effects an engine failure, aileron lockout, hydraulic or other malfunction could have had on an aircraft with reduced manoeuvrability caused by such a defect".

Which proves that, at the time of the malfunction and all the way from Los Angeles to London, the pilots of a fully-laden Air New Zealand jet had no idea what impact the fault might have on their ability to deal with any other possible emergency, like an engine failure or a hydraulic fault.

And if the flight crew didn’t know what they were dealing with, critics contend, they should have turned back and landed.

Frighteningly, it shows just how much Civil Aviation doesn’t know about this incident, and throws up new questions about the competence of CAA’s own investigation of the matter. Did CAA merely rubber stamp Air New Zealand’s official report?

"To summarise," says Kevin Ward, "the CAA is satisfied that there was no requirement under the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) requirements for the crew to have notified the American authorities.

"The crew made an informed decision to continue the flight having considered the appropriate guidance material as they are trained to do. This was later investigated by the airline and the crew actions were considered to be an appropriate method of dealing with the aileron deflection.

"The CAA monitored this investigation at the time and is satisfied that the airline acted in accordance with the requirements of aviation rules."

But what do the rules actually say?

New Zealand’s rules say that air traffic controllers should be notified by radio to "ensure that rapid notification is passed to the Authority. It will also allow the ATS [Air Traffic] provider to ensure that all records pertaining to the incident are retained should a consequential investigation be required…this action will also enable the air traffic service unit to initiate a timely corrective action should it be required."

Examples of serious incidents requiring immediate notification under ICAO rules include:

"Any loss or significant malfunction of one main system, sub system or set of equipment. For example…flight control system…significant asymmetry of flaps, slats, spoilers and the like…reversion to manual control of powered primary controls, other than for training or test purposes."

New Zealand Civil Aviation says its current guidelines indicate that it is up to the flight crew to decide how serious an incident is, but there are proposals in front of ICAO to modify the rules to make it "a requirement for States to establish mandatory incident reporting systems to facilitate the collection of information on actual or potential safety deficiencies."

ICAO figures also disclose that while a third of air fatalities are caused by aircraft inadvertently hitting the ground because of pilot error – known as "controlled flight into terrain" like the KAL 801 crash, "loss of control" at 26 percent of fatalities is the next largest cause of death and 21 percent of air fatalities are caused by "technical malfunctions".

It is also worth noting that ICAO and CAA rules state that:

"Substantial damage which occurs between the time any person boards an aircraft…and such time as all persons have disembarked…is to be notified and reported as an accident."

Is it arguable that a broken bolt fouling the aileron system is damage? Hard to know, but CAA Director Kevin Ward’s assurances are beginning to sound less and less reassuring.

"The CAA is committed to safety in aviation and will continue to investigate occurrences such as this. We will take appropriate action where required and will err on the side of safety where public air transport is involved," Ward concludes.

Readers will be able to form their own opinions on CAA’s expertise, but it is understood that the Beehive is beginning to have serious doubts about the structure of the CAA, which on the one hand is required to have a "relationship" with the industry, and on the other is then required to be an "independent" enforcement body.

The difficulties are further highlighted by CAA reporting to a Board of Directors that includes owners or representatives of major airlines.

Air New Zealand’s position is that it did nothing wrong and that the story is a magazine beat-up. Airline spokesman Cameron Hill delivered the airline’s prepared statement with the words: "You will want to read this in depth before you decide whether to publish this story, because it completely and utterly documents and rejects every one of your claims."

When we asked whether that meant Air New Zealand was prepared to release all of its internal reports on the matter so the travelling public could judge for themselves, Hill was unequivocal:

"No. We’re a private company. We don’t have to."

So what is Air New Zealand’s response?

"This incident was not comparable with the Alaskan Airlines’ MD-83 crash where it is believed the aircraft suffered a total loss of primary pitch control," continued David Beatson.

"The defect on B747 ZK-NBT was in a secondary lateral control - the right inboard aileron - and B747 control systems are designed so that the crew can retain operational control over the aircraft when this particular component is inoperative."

Which is all very well, except the crew didn’t know this at the time, you’ll recall. They had to ask Boeing after the plane landed. Nor had they been trained to deal with such a failure.

"After ZK-NBT’s departure from Los Angeles, the crew noticed that the right inner aileron was in the full down position and not responding to commands."

Again, the PR-speak image of merely looking out the window at some point and noticing the aileron down doesn’t quite convey the same sense of drama as the leaked report, which described how the crew were having difficulty pulling the plane out of a turn. Nor would the autopilot engage. And the plane had suffered a spoiler problem flying into Los Angeles that still had not been fixed.

"As they were able to operate the aircraft safely and legally on other more significant control systems, and had more fuel than would be required for the normal flight to Gatwick airport, they continued their flight. The flight was completed safely.

"You’re telling me that an Air New Zealand jumbo that had just taken off from LA only a few minutes earlier, lost control of an aileron and autopilot for unknown reasons and they didn’t turn back?"

Wolk was lost for words for a moment.

"That is the most unwise course of action they could possibly have taken. It is unconscionable. Airplanes do not cure themselves. They tend to get worse, not better. They were dealing with a lateral control issue which has the added danger that it could cause an uncontrolled roll of the aircraft.

"I would say that that was an extremely improvident course for Air New Zealand. The crew should gone out over the ocean, dumped the fuel, and landed at Los Angeles or Edwards Airforce Base. In fact, I would have bypassed LA and gone straight to Edwards, because the military runway is much longer.

"To have been so close to major airports, and decide to continue to London, risked the lives of the passengers, the crew and everybody on the ground below. Troubleshooting with passengers on board makes everyone on board a test pilot. And the problem with troubleshooting is this – if the thing you are troubleshooting suddenly fails in a more serious way because you are experimenting with it, then you might end up with a problem that as a pilot you can no longer handle.

"If you can hand-fly the airplane you can land it. And they should have. Immediately. To do otherwise is to play roulette with the lives of the passengers and crew. And that’s exactly what happened to Alaska in a similar situation.

"I’m a jet pilot with thousands of hours of flight experience. I can tell you now that you would never go five thousand miles with a control surface problem. That’s ludicrous! That’s so unsafe I can’t believe anyone would attempt to justify it.

"The thing that knocks me out is they fly this thing over long distances, LA to London, a large part of that is over the Arctic circle and the Atlantic ocean with no place to land. Just what, pray tell, did the Air New Zealand pilots propose to do if the situation worsened suddenly? There were no airports out there to save them."

According to Wolk, the flight crew should have notified both NZ authorities and US authorities immediately while they were in the air, and taken emergency action. He was also scathing of New Zealand Civil Aviation’s whitewash of the seriousness of the situation.

"Our Federal Aviation Administration is subject to the same criticism, and CAA in England is the same. These agencies work so closely with manufacturers and airlines that it’s a case of the tail wagging the dog. The airlines control them. That Air New Zealand situation is unjustifiable. This is the same airline isn’t it that put a DC-10 into Erebus? And if I recall the official investigation correctly there were serious concerns about the airline’s conduct after the crash – ‘an orchestrated litany of lies’."

Wolk’s criticisms of the FAA are backed up by former US Department of Transportation Inspector-General Mary Schiavo. Schiavo’s role included being chief watchdog of the FAA’s integrity, and when the Alaska Airlines investigation revealed that the FAA had "overlooked" many unsafe practices at Alaska, she wasn’t surprised.

"It reflects the ‘good-old-boy’ network in aviation. It’s just a comfortable way of doing business, the path of least resistance. Usually, nothing happens. It’s only when something happens that they get caught. Here it is very different because there are a lot of dead people."

Intriguingly, Schiavo adds that while she was Inspector-General, she often got complaints from FAA inspectors overseeing many different airlines that when they found safety irregularities and tried to get tough, they suddenly "got transferred".

The cosy relationship between the FAA and Alaska only surfaced because the airline initially boasted of a glowing FAA safety record. The smile soon vanished from Alaska and FAA faces when FBI agents and Department of Transportation officials raided offices and seized documents that may evidence that Alaska "encouraged criminally improper maintenance practices that were either sanctioned by or ignored by the FAA."

The reports of falsified maintenance records contrast sharply with earlier official statements that "Alaska has received high marks from the FAA Aircraft Certification Office for its level of compliance...Alaska, the 10th largest carrier [in the US] had the fewest number of fines for maintenance violations."

Alaska Airlines faced further embarrassment during the US federal investigation when a corporate training video hit the media soon after the Flight 261 crash. The videotells the story of a pilot in the 1940s who routinely loaded his plane with freight in Anchorage, hopped to a nearby frozen lake, unloaded his cargo onto the ice and returned. After taking on another load of freight in Anchorage, he flew back to the lake. There he replaced the first load with the second and took off to a remote village – having successfully sneaked the excessive cargo by federal safety inspectors.

"The way we figured it," explains a gravelly-voiced actor who plays the pilot on the training video, "if you can get it off the ground, it ain’t overloaded."

The video highlights how Alaska Airlines’ bush pilots, scornful of rules drafted by distant bureaucrats, provided a lifeline to isolated residents of the state.

The Seattle Times newspaper claims the pioneer swagger is still there – Alaska Airlines’ pilots wear leather bomber jackets rather than uniforms, and an inhouse newsletter recently boasted of an airline executive who authorised the purchase of 35 bottles of vodka in Siberia to de-ice a plane’s wings – something that the Federal Aviation Authority would have kittens over.

From Philadelphia, Arthur Wolk’s recommendation to Air New Zealand is simple: "Air New Zealand should have come out publicly and said ‘This was very poor judgement by our pilots. We’ve retrained our flight crew and this will never happen again’."

When Investigate pointed out that Air New Zealand had in fact promoted the pilots involved, Wolk was stunned.

"Look, this incident had the potential to bring Air New Zealand tremendous negative publicity if there’d been an accident, and tremendous economic damage to the airline. Instead of defending itself, the airline should be saying ‘We’re sorry, our crew made a big mistake’."

But Wolk makes another very salient point about the incident that the CAA failed to pick up. Air New Zealand’s internal report notes that the failure was caused by the remains of a bolt fastener that had snapped off from somewhere else and fouled the mechanism. "Its origin was not determined although it had obviously been lodged in this position for a considerable time [our emphasis]."

The question is, why hadn’t Air New Zealand’s maintenance checks discovered this earlier? How many flights over vast distances had this flight control timebomb been waiting to happen?

Wolk’s lawfirm has been involved in many major air crash investigations, and he says one thing comes through loud and clear.

"In my experience, the majority of air crashes occur because of defects or servicing negligence about which the manufacturers or the airlines are well aware."

It is a point to ponder as you consider that the leaked report reveals the Air New Zealand jet had not one but three faults. The report says categorically that "The aircraft had experienced an ongoing spoiler problem which had not been rectified in LAX. Accordingly the crew initially believed they had a spoiler problem."

This is extremely important. It means that the aircraft’s spoilers were already malfunctioning and had not been fixed, and then the right inner aileron failed as well, causing the autopilot to disengage.

How do you reconcile that potentially lethal flight control cocktail with the smooth assurances given by both Air New Zealand and Civil Aviation?

And does Air New Zealand have a "can-do" culture? Does it put profit before safety - ever? Group communications manager David Beatson says emphatically: "No".

"Air New Zealand utterly rejects this allegation. Your "airline source" has no factual basis for making this claim. The company is proud of its record of safe operation and keenly aware of public concern about airline safety issues.

"Air New Zealand invests very substantial sums each year in crew training and retraining, on aircraft and aviation infrastructure maintenance, and on safety monitoring and auditing activities to ensure it meets both national and international legal and regulatory requirements.

"The company is judged by the international insurance industry - which is in a position to assess such matters objectively - to be one of the lowest risk airline operators in the world today."

Beatson’s last point is certainly true. Air New Zealand’s safety record - as evidenced by the number of major crashes - is certainly a lot better than many other airlines, but it doesn’t tell potential flyers whether the airline is excellent or just the best of an overall average bunch.

Air New Zealand came within a whisker of losing a 747 in a midair collision off Los Angeles before Christmas, and while it was the US Navy’s fault, that wouldn’t have made the resulting tragedy any easier on the families of people killed.

How, then, does Air New Zealand treat those pilots who do raise safety issues? Surely, if Air New Zealand is as committed to safety as it claims, it would bend over backwards to err on the side of caution.

So let’s return for a moment to November’s Investigate. In it, we ran an article on aviation safety by Barbara Sumner that another monthly "current affairs" magazine that benefits from Air New Zealand advertising had decided at the last minute not to run. She recounted an incident that took place on an Air New Zealand jet in Japan:

Three more senior Air New Zealand pilots who spoke "on the record" to the New Zealand Listener in 1989 about safety concerns found themselves on the thick end of million dollar lawsuits and were crushed by the airline.

Which is probably the reason our anonymous source inside the airline doesn’t want Air New Zealand to find out his name, and in the best journalistic traditions of source protection we have agreed to comply with that request.

The public will be able to judge for themselves whether Air New Zealand’s past policy of trying to silence critics re-emerges as a result of this article, or whether the airline has indeed turned over a new leaf and become more willing to accept open and public debate on issues of air safety that affect every person who shells out money for an air ticket in this country.

But we have some direct knowledge of our own about the airline’s willingness to take calculated safety risks. In December 1993, an Air New Zealand jumbo jet with a known brake fault on its wheels took off from Auckland to Rarotonga – a destination with a short runway and surrounded by mountains. The Captain advised passengers not to worry because the plane would increase its engine braking to compensate for the problem.

Our source within Air New Zealand raised some further anecdotal incidents that he believed had taken place. Some of those have been confirmed, some have been been incorrect, and some are still under investigation by this magazine.

In New Zealand, it is hard for the news media or the public to find out about unsafe incidents on major airlines. Air New Zealand refuses to release its internal reports, and Civil Aviation’s Safety Investigation Manager, Richard White, also refuses to release reports on specific instances.

"There is a real concern that should it become known in the aviation sector that the CAA will release such information upon request then individuals will be less likely to provide such information to the CAA."

Contrast that position with America’s NTSB, which publishes on a website available to anyone reports on more than 45,000 aviation safety incidents, naming airlines, aircraft, dates, what happened and who was to blame.

Is New Zealand’s culture of secrecy really necessary, when compared to the open and free exchange of information found in the US? Or is it just another sign that New Zealand is still an immature democracy that doesn’t trust its citizens to make informed decisions?